TYCA West: Open Source BABY!

TYCA-West Conference
October 12-13, 2007
Building Bridges of Lifelong Learners

Everyone is an Expert at Something: How the Open Source Software Movement and Community College Generated Content Empowers Local Communities, Local Action and Changes the World
Chris Riseley , Snow College

Huge movement that is occurring and a lot of people in education, esp. two year college faculty, do not know about it...open source. Open source is “sharing.”
Who does this sharing?
Institutions across the planet!

What does this sharing look like?

• LibriVox —Open source sharing of audio files of works in public domain. Who decides what is available...we do! No one text is privileged.
• Ubuntu —Linux based operating system. Ubuntu has a foundation set up to continue to support Ubuntu.

Chris also discussed that using open source software is not only ethically sound; but, it also models using these tools with our students. Finally, he stressed how important it is to give back to the open source communities. He showed the how to ”get involved” page at Ubuntu as an example of how and why we, as English teachers, are useful to the software community.

Finally, I just want to give props to Chris for presenting two fantastic, geeky presentations at TYCA-West two years in a row! And he’s down this as a part-time faculty member!

November 18 2007 | Posted in TYCA-West